Synopsis
This anthology comic of horror tales eschews conventional terrors, and instead offers twenty-six unsettling stories of weird and original dread: stories of infection, isolation, and alienation that give us new reasons to be afraid.
Review
In putting together a recent graphic novel anthology of horror stories called The Sleep of Reason: An Anthology of Horror, C. Spike Trotman banned would-be writers and artists from submitting work about vampires, zombies, and traditional monsters. Her reasons, according to twitter and various UStreams and Livestreams, were that all these creatures had a set of rules. Spike says it best on her Kickstarter page for the Iron Circus project: Inspired by likes of Taboo, Uzumaki and Black Hole, this collection is devoid of the familiar by design. There are no garden-variety monsters in The Sleep of Reason; no well-worn terrors from film and television. This is an anthology of comics that strive to inspire unparalleled dread. No monsters with a rule book. No easy answers. She puts forward a fair point. When you know staking a vampire reduces him to a cloud of dust or removing a zombie's head neutralizes the threat of being eaten, a pattern of justice is clearly in place. Rules and boundaries have been established by a righteous God in an ordered universe. When the undead digress these rules by being undead, tools and opportunities are made available to kill them to those obedient enough to listen. The most terrifying part of Drew Goddard's 2012 film, Cabin in the Woods, is not the revelation of why the teenagers who have gone camping need to be killed. Those monsters that appear at the end to destroy the world are disconcerting, but they're there because a system was in place and its rules were transgressed. Of course the giants have come to take what's theirs. No, the most terrifying part of Cabin in the Woods is Fran Kranz as Marty wandering out into the forest, high and staring at the sky. I thought there'd be stars, he says. We are abandoned. If there's any order in the universe, this moment seems to say, it's an order that is not working for our protagonists. The best stories of The Sleep of Reason explore this disruption. In Carla Speed McNeil's The Waiting Game, the artist chooses to illustrate a nightmare. In it, a desiccated old woman is wheeled out into a room where younger people watch and smile as they lay her out on the floor and wait for her to eat from a cake. When the woman finally eats, the results show a universe that doesn't care how old she is, who she is, or what she is. The other participants in the grisly ritual remain uninterested in aiding her. From a standpoint of pure psychological horror, The Waiting Game appears to be about fear of aging. This is probably a correct, perhaps obvious interpretation, but the monster in the room isn't just the wreckage of age. Ultimately, much like the partygoers in McNeil's nightmare, what's really monstrous is the idea that no one intervenes. No one cares. A conflict is presented, but there is no system in place to protect the main character. Four PM is Tea Time by Ty and Lee Blauersouth also plays with powerlessness. In this comic, a little girl and her family are moving into a new house. When both her parents are hurt by a strange force, she watches as they grow mute and blind. They mime their roles as her guardians while becoming increasingly inaccessible and strange. The horror here is not simply in the way her parents' humanity is stripped away, but in the fact the main character, a little girl, literally has no one to go to or any idea of what to do. Those she depends on to help and keep her safe are physically close but also couldn't be further away. There is no one here to protect her, no clear way to get back to the world she once had. There's no opportunity to be presented with a vampire's heart where one can comfortably fit a stake and stop everything bad from happening. ... --Gillian Daniels, The Analytical Couch Potato
Spike and the assembled artists behind The Sleep of Reason did a fantastic job. Each horror story has its own unconventional threat - monsters seen and unseen that pursue, invade, and forever change their victims. Refreshingly, these tales do not rely on gore, torture, or other cheap tricks to spook you. Violence and blood happen but they are incidental tools; the authors never ask you to be frightened by a swinging hatchet or a severed head. Instead they grope deeper to court your fears of abandonment, authority, disillusionment, pregnancy, infection, and ... Well, the list goes on. Gore and violence happen only after your vulnerable fears are led into the open, pushed to the wall, and surrounded. The storytelling quality in this anthology covers a wide terrain, unfiltered and raw. Some pieces fell flat for me but I wouldn't change them; the total effect of the mixture is an unignorable authenticity of voice. A creepy tale ending with a gallows-humor joke is followed by a mercilessly professional and hard piece that unflinchingly saws you open. Others draw you into a diffuse, eerie confusion that defies logic, and yet others lay out a nightmare so brazen and vivid and clear it makes you cry. You won't enjoy every story but standing among them will be at least one, pitch black, that stares right into you. It is an adventurous collection. the stories that held nothing back in their devotion to drive headlong over the edge of sanity will be with me for years. --Goodreads
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